On most days, the towering green crane at the Everport Terminal in the Port of Los Angeles would be busy hoisting containers off colossal cargo ships. Dockworkers in “bomb carts” would dart beneath it, while trucks hauled furniture, auto parts, and clothing across the country. Yet one recent Thursday, the 300-foot crane stood silent—one more casualty of President Trump’s trade tariffs. Nearly 20 percent of the 99 ships port director Gene Seroka expected in May never showed.
“It’s an unusually quiet day,” Seroka remarked. “That’s what tariffs do.”
Together with neighboring Long Beach, the Port of Los Angeles spans roughly 75 miles of Southern California coastline and moves 40 percent of America’s containerized imports and 30 percent of its exports. Activity there rises and falls with the president’s shifting tariff policy, putting some 100,000 port workers and hundreds of thousands of importer businesses in limbo.
Early this year, shippers rushed goods through before duties hit multi-decade highs, but that surge quickly faded. When tariffs climbed to 145 percent in April, large swaths of China-U.S. trade ground to a halt. Imports and the U.S. trade gap both posted record one-month drops, while bookings for China-to-U.S. containers fell by half, according to Vizion and Dun & Bradstreet.
Chinese exports to the United States plunged about 35 percent year-over-year in May—the steepest decline outside the pandemic era—making it the Port of Los Angeles’s slowest month in more than two years. A partial tariff pause in late April and a limited U.S.–China deal in early May have sparked a small rebound in future bookings, but nothing close to normal.
Supply disruptions and price spikes are mounting. Freightos data show the cost to ship a container from China to Southern California has doubled since March as importers scramble for space in case tariffs rise again. Economists warn these costs will seep into retail prices later in the year, and consumer demand could falter after many businesses and households front-loaded purchases in early 2025.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, calls the levies “a very serious threat” that is “just about to hit the economy.”
Trade imbalances are stark: four loaded containers arrive for every one that leaves with American goods, and three go back empty—exactly the deficit the president decries. Critics argue tariffs jeopardize today’s trade-linked jobs without reviving large-scale U.S. manufacturing, which now employs only 8 percent of workers versus 22 percent in 1980.
Mario Cordero, CEO of the Port of Long Beach, warns the strategy risks many current livelihoods while offering little evidence the old factory era can return. The ports themselves have become an economic engine: officials estimate a million Southern California jobs—from truck drivers to warehouse crews—depend on their flow of cargo, all subject to White House policy shifts.
At the union hiring hall that Thursday, electronic boards listed about 40 percent fewer daily jobs than normal. Trucking firms feel the pain as well. Erick Gordon of Redefined Transportation in Long Beach says container moves are down by half; his company has cut rates, chased new customers, and laid off half its drivers merely to survive.
The last time tariffs soared this high was the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act, whose tit-for-tat escalation deepened the Great Depression. Imports collapsed 40 percent within two years.
Founded in 1907 and boosted by early rail links, the Port of Los Angeles transformed in the 1960s with standardized shipping containers and Asia’s factory boom. After China joined the WTO in 2001, the port’s fortunes grew entwined with Chinese industry: today 45 percent of its business is China-related.
The past decade has tested the ports repeatedly—Trump’s first-term trade war, the pandemic, and now a fresh tariff whipsaw. Each shock has improved their crisis playbook, says Jon Poelma, who runs APM Terminals’ massive facility at the port: better yard utilization, more data-sharing, faster cargo flow.
His terminal, the Western Hemisphere’s largest, looked emptier than weeks before yet still outperformed last year thanks to a shipping alliance favored by big retailers who continue importing while smaller firms pull back. Forecasting demand, Poelma admits, is harder than ever.
“The one certainty,” he said, “is that uncertainty isn’t going away.”
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